“Where are you going?” Bob stood up and looked out the window. “How long?”
I was excited.
“Anakoinosis! I will share what I have learned about your ships in the sky and your prediction of more of your kind coming to live among us.”
Bob’s voice sounded like it was cracking. “You will not try to escape, then?”
“I could not do that,” I told him.
He shook his head.
“What is this anakoinosis? The men told me you mean sex,” Bob said. I stared at him blankly. “Reproduction?” Bob continued.
I grabbed his hand.
“I will show you what it is.”
In all my memories, in the last two years, and so many generations of whiffets since the sky broke and aerokratois came among us, I don’t think any of the aerokratois had taken the time to understand what anakoinosis really was.
They were too busy worrying about the Great Repair and how to feed the Hopper with Metal.
Two years was not long to them.
Bob followed me out of his hut.
A small group met on the far side of a hill an hours’ walk away from the lights and buildings. They didn’t know what to think about Bob, but I talked to them gently until they agreed to let him stay.
Bob sat in the grass and watched.
One of the four whiffets still had patchy fur, but he was excited. He had learned how to operate one of the yellow machines by looking in through the windows at the aerokratois while they operated it.
It would have been better to wait until his fur was thick, but he was in a dangerous job. I chose him.
The other three faced each other, a triple act of anakoinosis. I turned away from them and grabbed the arms of the other.
His tattoo was NL-501.
I leaned forward and brushed my cheek against his, hugged him; and felt my skin stir. He smelled of machinery, aerokratois, and dirt.
I slowly began to molt as we held each other tight. The fur on my arms and chest intermingled with his. We rotated, pushing our backs against each other, then rubbed our legs together.
Fur sloughed off, responding to touch, and drifted into a compact ball on the ground. Naked, we both sat next to the new egg and watched it bind itself tight.
The loss of fur made me very hungry, and tired.
I let go of 501 and walked over to Bob, who sat very still.
“Explain this to me.” I could barely hear his voice as I sat next to him. We watched the trio standing over by their own egg.
“This child, when it matures will have both the memories and understandings of my insights with you, and the insights of learning how to operate the yellow machines,” I tell Bob. “That is anakoinosis; true understanding. The egg will be brought to our masters, and they will choose who to bind the children to, as that will let them learn more than I could ever teach them. They know everything that I have known.”
“But these are your children!” Bob was loud now. He got up and walked in slow circles again.
“They are us.” I followed him around in circles. “They will be bound. They will be paired with those who know different things. If you had been one of us, before you died, we would share anakoinosis, so your knowledge would not be lost, and the memories of those after us increase. Only after our masters die are we free, and alone.”
Bob’s mouth hung open. He was trying hard to understand. It was the closest an aerokrat could get to anakoinosis.
“It must be a survival mechanism. You commingle to pass on all your knowledge. Your fur . .’.” He stopped and ran his hand over my bare skin. “It’s protein, right? The DNA must combine, they… I don’t know…” He looked up into the sky. “I cannot believe they decided against unfreezing anyone to study you all. We need the scientists down here!” A new thought caught him, and he whirled on me. “What happens to you when there are no new masters with new memories, when you share all?”
I spread my arms.
“Those are happy times,” I said. I remembered generations of pleasant times in the woods. Times when you knew, from all your prior foreparents’ memories, which trees could produce fruit every year. How many could gather in a copse and not go hungry. The feel of the sun on bare skin by the coast. Communal ana-koinosis of hundreds together. Stasis for thousands and thousands of generations, with no new ideas to be found.
“These are not happy times,” Bob said.
“These are learning times.” I pointed at the Hopper. “We must learn everything you can teach us. And then, when there is nothing more to learn, we can have happy times. We will be just like you.”
Bob shook his head.
“It won’t work like that. It won’t.”
“But it will. It always has. In memory, there were other threats. Great predatory animals, others of my kind who knew very different things who came from different parts of the land we lived on before you took us away. We incorporate them, become them, reflect them, remember them, their thoughts, and their essence. We will do the same to you.”
Bob walked away from me. I ran to catch up with his long strides.
“There is never stasis with humans.” His feet hit the ground hard. “We always change.”
“Then we will learn this, and…”
“Not as long as you consider us different, or masters of any knowledge. You will always be bound. And since we have longer lifespans than you, you will be bound forever.”
I could barely keep up with him.
“Well, yes. Eventually your young will need to become bound to us if they are to learn new things.”
Bob stopped.
“What?”
I smiled happily and said nothing.
“We can’t share memories with you,” Bob’s hands waved in the air. “Humans barely understand and agree with each other.”
“We will come to be just like each other. That is how things must work. We will become just like you, and once we are just like you, you will be just like us. We will do all the same things to each other.”
Bob looked down at the ground.
“Oh, god!” He rubbed his forehead. “You might just do that.”
He walked in silence back to his home, me right by his side. Inside he made liquids and drank them late into the night, while I watched.
He shook. It was not
When he thought I had fallen asleep he picked up a blanket and spread it over me.
“I think we fucked up real bad here, whiffet,” he said, his voice slurred and funny sounding. “And I don’t know how to stop this mess. I just don’t know how.”
My aerokrat became strange. He avoided me, refused to let me work, and he stayed out late. That went on for many nights.
It seemed like he was trying to induce anakoinosis in the other aerokratois in his own way, but not doing well.
He finally came home one night with bruised eyes and a bleeding Up* People gathered outside Bob’s hut, screaming and shouting at him.
Bob said some of his companions listened to him and were sympathetic. But there was the Great Repair to be thought of, and most ridiculed him for questioning the need to get everything fixed on his ship as soon as possible.
“They say we have to return to civilization, or our machines will eventually fail us and we’ll all die as savages here on this planet,” Bob says.
We sat at his small table.
